Laruellian/Lacanian Clones

Of the various terms that Francois Laruelle utilizes in his non-philosophy, none is odder than cloning.

Non-philosophical cloning is the performative method by which and from which, the stranger (or alien-subject) utilizes the transcendental material which comprises the world in order to foster new decisions and break current philosophical horizons. Where all philosophical thought according to Laruelle is founded upon a decision where a datum and factum (such as actual/virtual) are auto-posited as reciprocally constituting and given, non-philosophical cloning operates by distinguishing the Real term from the ideal term thereby turning the loop into a one way street. That is, the alien subject liberates immanence (the Real as absolute cause) from the transcendent (as occasional cause). Instead of transcendence functioning as a position of evaluation, transcendence becomes the result of loosing immanence as such from its correlationist trap thereby passing through the transcendental material (as a kind of accelerant) pointing a meteor towards the world from which the subject was cloned from.

However, it is fitting that the stranger/alien-subject is created via cloning since any sense of ontogenesis or non-ontological creation is eschewed by non-philosophy in total. While Brassier would no doubt argue that any sense of origin is already deciding on phenomenology as the subject’s horizon, we might suggest that a theory which disregards intentionality (as does Michel Henry and Deleuze’s system) and also takes the un-decisional or unconscious into account, might disrupt the stranger as being merely a lonely clone. John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Thought clearly indicates the formers vehement rejection of the unconscious.

To me it seems, by virtue of being born in a society, one is going to be pretty dinged up by the time the subject gets to the point of even possibly realizing their own solitude – that is, there seems to be an ambiguity between the coming to be of the alien-subject and always already being an alien subject in Brassier’s Alien Theory and Laruelle’s work on the whole.

Following Brassier, while every perceptual frame is auto-positioned with the real being grasped by a closed system of immanence and transcendence instead of being loosed as it is in non-philosophy – this does not negate the individual’s battered matter that occurs prior to knowing or even thinking it. Decision is a splitting which, via philosophy, is automatically sown back together but, despite Brassier’s critique of Churchland, there are decisions (that is to say unbindings followed by bindings) which happen by coincidence hence the neurological science saying ‘neurons that fire together wire together.’

Prior to the subject and the stranger that the individual would be of a different register where instead of inhabiting a world the world inhabits them – that is, where the passage from the subject to the stranger is the shift from ‘thinking of’ the Real to ‘thinking with’ the Real, the passage from the individual to the subject would be ‘from the Real’ to the Real. So individual-subject-alien would be parallel to ‘I am the Real (there is only immanence)’-‘the Real is not (there is only me via transcendence)’- ‘I am not the Real’ (I should think with it). That is we could look at Lacan’s progression of the Real in terms of Symbolic/Imaginary/Real in this sense.

Symbolic – Living in the chain of signifiers prior to self identification/limitation – gives one the idea that they are god (the infant sees all as part of their being) but they must still communicate sense they are born into the chain (eventually the mother can refuse their cries etc). This would be the un-decisional since there are signifiers and signified but no fixed set of meaning.

Imaginary – Once the self is articulated we see ourselves as more than ourselves the imago compensates for our broken (but never really existent) pre-Oedipal being. The introduction of the law (via the father or the transcendental material, the World) covers over the impossibility of godlike being with prohibition. Here we have the possibility of the transcendent view and hence the decisional.

Real – The very position of the subject (the economy of absence and presence is nullified) is obliterated in the wake of the real as a terrifying abyss/trauma (we could say actual immanence). We realize that our being from the beginning has always been this mute ‘isness’ and nothing more.

Of course these are deceptively neat cleavages - the imaginary relies on the symbolic by fixing and quilting signifier’s into pleasantly coherent fantasies. In other words, once we recognize our alienation from ourselves as well as the Other, the subject casts a complex phantasmatic net which restricts and allows their action in accordance with their contextual existence. The symbolic kills the very thing it tries to represent thereby digging a hole in reality instead of effectively grasping the always-already signified of the object qua object.

The Real is present at all stages as well and it would seem that it is treated with ignorance, then avoidance and eventually acceptance. I would argue however that such an acceptance, such as in the project of a Zizekian/Lacanian ethics, has stumbled primarily on the transition from the stage of the Imaginary to that of the Real. As exemplified in texts such as Lee Edelman’s No Future and Rey Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic, a politics of unbearable-being, of attempting to inhabit the drive, has appeared as the most common ethics of the Real. Alenka Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real is the is the obvious touchstone here though Lorenzo Chisea argues that she looses her way towards the end. Similair to Kolozova, Zupancic seems to fall onto the body, the remainder of castration, as the last guarantor of ethics - the stupid piece of meat.

The clone has an articulation, outside the non-philosophic sense, in Baudrillard’s scattered thought. In “Clone Story” Baudrillard argues that cloneing is the death of sexuality, it is the loosed death drive, that the clone does not encounter the mirror stage, for Baudrillard it is the death of individuation. Baudrillard’s collapse of the mirror stage supports Brassier and Laruelle’s jump from individual to alien subject. While most of Baudrillard’s account is a hysterical luddism, his conceptualization of cloning gains the most traction with non-philosophy in the non-genesis of the clone.

That is, Laruelle is clear that the stranger has no history, no sense of genesis, and it is here where psychoanalysis seems furthest from and closest to non-philosophy. Where some phenomenologists and deconstructionists have claimed that that psychoanalysis attempts to describe origins as such, it is always a hypothetical past, one of historical truth and not material truth. Thus, where psychoanalysis is almost obsessed with possible origins (in least in terms of effect) non-philosophy rejects them all together. Yet, at the same time, both non-philosophy and psychoanalysis are posited as meta-discourses (operationally) while denouncing meta-languages (as Mullarkey suggests in Post-Continental Philosophy). In both cases the question is to what extent do these parasitic discourses (or perhaps just symbiotic) as always already conditioning all philosophy, all thought and the Real itself?

Non-linearity and Momentum

Following Nick of The Accursed Share’s brilliant remarks on Brassier’s reading of Deleuze, I wish to return to the following passage from Nihil Unbound:

“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).

The above quote has, for several weeks now, has plagued me and I do not believe simply because it is a serious challenge to transcendental Materialism – the philosophical doctrine to which I have been bound to for almost half a decade. The above is indicative of several issues in Speculative Realism that have been bothering me, particularly that of narrative and momentum.

In the above quote Brassier makes several assumptions:

1 – Brassier assumes that Zizek ontologizies the transcendental subject a la Kant and that a transcendental subject is necessary in order to retroactively assume/assert one’s freedom.

2 – Following the subject’s purported transcendentalism, that the subject chooses its objective status (and not its subjective status since, for Brassier, it must always already be transcendental) due to the fact that the absolutization of contingency nulls such a possibility. This is how Brassier concludes that all choice is arbitrary.

First let us engage the first point:

As is clear in his more recent works, Zizek’s use of the transcendental subject is an affirmative positioning and does not bear a necessarily ontological status. For instance, Zizek points out that the transcendental can be a useful political position such as when Mao, in response to the USA’s position of atomic weapons, quipped that it would make little difference to the universe if the entire Chinese race was wiped off the face of the planet. In a vein similar to Lacan’s use of the line from Jarry’s Ubu Roi that ‘Imagine there’s no Poland,’ the idea is that poles would exist even if Poland no longer did.
We might immediately assume that the above reeks of transcendental idealism, but does it necessarily? If the Real is that which guarantees the possibility of consistency, that is, it is that which forces all things to be self limiting to maintain their consistency, doesn’t this fall close to Meillassoux’s concept of factuality, the concept of unreason? The Real is, in essence, the consistency of the failure of things to corrupt one another completely – the guarantee that something, outside of difference, allows for difference as such.

Thus, just because the subject can place itself in a noetic position, does not mean that it is no longer an object. As Zizek argues apropos Daniel Dennet, the subject is caught in the very nexus of determinism. Now let us move on to the second point.

Brassier points out that Meillassoux’s principle of unreason negates the very concept of material determinism. But doesn’t this, as Nick points out, purport a rather odd conception of temporality? Doesn’t Brassier’s comment above collapse the thought that ‘things happened for a, or due to reason’ and ‘things happened the way they did because that is what happened?’ Both Brassier and Meillassoux seem to argue that, because anything can happen due to hyper chaos, then the way things did happen has no bearing on the present. Nick’s mention of Quantum Entanglement is very apt here as is Einstein’s response to it. Einstein referred to the theory as ‘spooky action at a distance’ which, to him, seemed to invalidate physics. Brassier and Meillassoux then are implicit proponents of the principle of locality, that only the present changes the present. But, as many experiments, though controversial, have shown, objects at a distance can and do affect one another. Taking a quantum reading of action at a distance into affect, one might be able to recapitulate Zizek’s forced choice.

Via experiments in quantum teleportation, it has been shown that entangled particles can have an immediate affect on one another but such an effect can only be registered after the experiment has taken place. The collision of these particles brings us to the famous Heisenberg principle and back to Meillassoux and Hume’s billiard balls. As Anton Zeilinger notes, information is smeared across the two particles making it unclear how the first was able to affect the second. Taking into account then that the transcendental position is just a position, if the force of the forced choice can be taken as material, not because of a complete determinism as Brassier suggests (although we may perceive it as such), but because of the speed of influence, because of the incompleteness of objects and that this incompleteness is spread from object to object. There is then, no ‘noumenal/subjective autonomy but only an unconsciousness registering of the collision, taking down on the ‘other scene’ of the brain. Zizek’s mistake then is in regards to the term reflection which, instead, should be articulated as a kind of registration.

The aforementioned Zeilinger has discussed ‘two freedoms’ due to the fact that the choice of instrument to locate the particle effects the result of the outcome but does not completely determine it (because of unpredictability – hyper chaos) hence the freedom of the researcher and that of nature. Zeilinger goes on, in terms similar to Meillassoux’s, to argue for things in and of themselves exist and we can only access them indirectly.  The instrumental arrestation of any particle is inaccurate because the measurement affects the outcome but this does not negate the impossibility of a perception-independent reality.

Have we then swung back to correlationism, that the existence of the in itself is, in fact, dependent on our observation? Clearly not – while our thoughts can reshape matter, it cannot disregard it, nor would the inexistence of our thoughts have any consequence on existence itself. For Meillassoux, our ability to think a time (and following Brassier a place) where there is no thought, is a uniquely human characteristic. But any sort of indirect thinking, that is having thought hypostasized in any way is automatically correlationist. Again, as Nick points out, Brassier’s reading of Deleuze slides between time being contracted by thought and time being reduced to a brute matter, a kind of Schellingesque unground – time as a pulsation of matter itself.

The unconscious disjunction between being and thinking disrupts our relation to time not in a way that we simply spatialize it, but in that we imperfectly experience it and register it in ways that are not chronological. Again, this does not mean that time is merely subjective but neither does it mean that we can have no relation to the past or to the future that is merely imaginary. Choice, then, cannot be reduced to mere compulsion as Brassier would have it – not because we can remove ourselves from the realm of objects affecting objects, but because there are non-local entities affecting our movement and our objective status. The unconscious is not purely noumenal in this sense but simply non-linear.

It would seem that a Speculative Realist theory of representation would have much to learn from psychoanalysis and that Manuel Delanda has much to say in regards to Meillassoux’s issues with the appearence of chaos.

Against Phenomenology

The following is from Plato’s Phaedo, Book 1:

“The philosopher desires death–which the wicked world will insinuate that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is the separation of soul and body–and the philosopher desires such a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth. All the evils and impurities and necessities of men come from the body. And death separates him from these corruptions, which in life he cannot wholly lay
aside. Why then should he repine when the hour of separation arrives? Why, if he is dead while he lives, should he fear that other death, through which alone he can behold wisdom in her purity?”

On first inspection it would appear that the oppositional stance to Plato’s position here (which smells of rampant universalism) would be one that is cognitive, analytical and ultimately phenomenological. Essentially, the body is all that there is and cognition becomes epiphenomenal - the mere byproduct of physical apparatuses. This view flourished at the turn of the century (Darwin’s Bulldog famously stated that mental experiences were like the train whistle on the train, and to say nothing of Pavlov’s experiments) then died out then flourished again with qualia obsessed scientists who argue that physical experiences determine and events and not thoughts - they dismiss that conscious thinking (which can be couched in terms of free will) have anything to do with subsequent (or any) action following an event or previous action.

We can then venture to more strictly philosophical territory. The phenomenological push, which still thrives in contemporary theory, can be readily traced to Husserl or, more likely, to the more familiar name, and student of Husserl, Heidegger. Heidegger’s reductionist metaphysics places the world into a kind of object based existence where things are tied to Dasein through their utility and to the world they invoke.

Heidegger, and his ilk, are fascinated by death - Blanchot, Artaud, Baitaille, Levinas and so forth. Death is, more than anything, an un-experiential act, the very limits of our subjectivity in psychoanalysis. It seems that death, as the final judgment, is a phenomenological fascination in that it seems to define the contours of existence as utility/objects/faces et cetera, negatively - the not deathly that we can only partially experience through the other as such. Death, it seems, has a utility in that it unbinds time and being, finally, to give a kind of rest.The complexities of time, as discussed by Zielinski, point towards a radical natural philosophy, towards a temporal, as well as spatial, perforation of the earth. What does this do to Heidegger’s world as such? Do we end up with a porus world, one in which the vile vorticies reek havoc on the stability of being?

In the aforementioned text Plato goes on to say:

“The hollows on the surface of the globe vary in size and shape from that which we inhabit: but all are connected by passages and perforations in the interior of the earth. And there is one huge chasm or opening called Tartarus, into which streams of fire and water and liquid mud are ever flowing; of these small portions find their way to the surface and form seas and rivers and volcanoes. There is a perpetual inhalation and exhalation of the air rising and falling as the waters pass into the depths of the earth and return again, in their course forming lakes and rivers, but never descending below the centre of the earth; for on either side the rivers flowing either way are stopped by a precipice. These rivers are many and mighty, and there are four principal ones, Oceanus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and Cocytus. Oceanus is the river which encircles the earth; Acheron takes an opposite direction, and after flowing under the earth through desert places, at last reaches the Acherusian lake,–this is the river at which the souls of the dead await their return to earth. Pyriphlegethon is a stream of fire, which coils round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus. The fourth river, Cocytus, is that which is called by the poets the Stygian river, and passes into and forms the lake Styx, from the waters of which it gains new and strange powers. This river, too, falls into Tartarus.”

There is (perhaps unplatonically or supraplatonically if one follows a perverse logic of the forms) a truth to Plato’s false description in that Plato’s description, though unscientific, explains the un-phenomenological grappling of the Earth’s interior. Going back to Zielinski, the work of Althanasius Kircher, in particular his investigation of the crater of Vesuvias, led him to propose a theory regarding Earth’s internal fires and a subterrain ocean. The same kind of thinking was adopted by Hutton who saw the interior of the earth as a massive heat engine. We should say, that in the wake of this massiveness, and against Plato, the philosopher’s most tantilizing escape would be that of death, of denying the wave of nihilism that washes over us when we are met, face to face, with the hollowness of the universe. As Mark Twain put it:

“There is nothing. There is no god and no universe. There is only empty space, and in it, a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible thought, and I am that thought. And god and the universe and time and life and death and joy and sorrow and pain only a grotesque and brutal dream evolved from the frantic imagination and that insane thought.”

Yet, in terms of quantum physics, and as Zizek stated, something went wrong and out of that negativity came something terrible - life as we know it. The attempts to go back and assign an order to the primordial chaos have, as any handful of contemporary theorists will tell you, has failed. And yet, in the hands of Derrideans and Heideggerians and some others, the great chain of being has been fused back together in the illusion of its very denial. There is a kind of mourning where thinkers have tried to give us back some kind of warmth culled from the dead of space. Derrida is most famous here - he tried the promise, friendship, the moment of archiving and so forth. Ray Brassier responds to this kind of thinking thusly:

“The disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity” (Nihil Unbound, p. xi).

Baudrillard began a short chapter in Simulcra and Simulation with the phrase: “When you take everything away nothing is left. This is false.” And that is the truest kernel and, the difference between the phenomenologists and psychoanalysis. For Freud, when you take everything away there is something left - there is the stain of the real - this is clear in his discussions of Jewishness in Moses and Monotheism - there is always a remainder. That remainder is the gap of freedom - the kind of materially Cambrian explosion in which the phenomenological breaks down.

Phenomenology, at its roots, only has, as the ultimate reproach to the ‘rampant nihilism’, the cozy retreat to Heidegger’s cottage of Earth masquerading as a new way of being. The celebration of heterogenity as is advoated by the likes of Foucault, Zielinkski, Manuel De Landa, and others, must, whether they desire to or not, push is in a direction that is, begging for pained sighs, metaphyiscal. Even grasping at anti-transcendental straws such as Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO (Body without organs) - where the transcendental is smuggled under the blanket of the immanent - leaves one with the sense of nice but no cigar

Human and Animal

/1/ - Critical Separation

What is it that separates human beings from animals? It is a simple question in the most broad sense and one that is constantly answered and simultaneously unanswerable. The connective tissue is one immersed in violence - when humans are treated ‘like animals’ do both the torturers and the subjects of torture become less than human or do both become more human? Is the infliction of pain on another person a human act assuming its outside of survival, clearly human and is what makes us human in our suffering the fact that, a la V for Vendetta, there is that which can never be destroyed by violence, the inch of our unknowable subjectivity which grants us the possibility of immortality.

Such capacity for immortality is the only purely human trait according to Badiou’s Ethics. In an interview appendix of the text, Badiou is jokingly attacked by Peter Hallward for being too hard on animals. Badiou states that, in a sort of material sense, we are animals, we belong in the category of animals. What sets is apart on a base level is our use of mathematics and, as Badiou sees it, it is mathematics which is the language which allows us to understand ontology, to access the possibility of subjective fidelity to an event, to become a subject in the wake of an event. Badiou argues that the animality of humans is exceeded by a kind of grace of thought - though the event is itself only materiality, it is a materiality grasped in a way that cannot be reduced to the interactions of the material pieces of our animal brains.

In terms of history of course, the line is blurred through long years of horrific treatment. The institution of slavery, the popularity of humans-as-spectacle in various world’s fairs - the human zoo of the Paris exposition, the odd fame of the Hottentot Venus and so forth. Given that so much animal treatment has primarily to do with enclosure, it should be no surprise that Agamben constructs the difference between animal and human with spatial perception as the material. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal perceives a mess of small worlds whereas only the human being sees the open as such, the broad system. The chapter entitled ‘Tick’ is an excellent example - the creature is blind and only sniffs out blood to feed on. Nietzsche’s comments about animal memory in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, seem to come to a similar conclusion - the absence of history in animals leaves them in ignorant bliss.

/2/ - Contractual Interrelations

Waltzing through Manhattan instantly gives one an idea of how people will go for their pets emotionally, conceptually and financially. The anthropomorphization of dogs and cats in particular is evidence of the weight of anthrozoological relations. The domestication of the dog and the horse goes back tens of thousands of years and the use of live stock just as far if not further. Despite technological advance, services animals are still widely used to aid the blind and the deaf, and the benefits of human-animal contact for the sick and disabled is still popular.

A brief tour of reality television illustrates human investment in the pet - The Dog Whisperer, documents the inability of humans to control their pets as well as the relative ease of doing so. Interestingly enough, Cesar Milan’s approach is to instruct the owner to become a pack leader, an odd sort of Deleuzian becoming-animal if there ever was one. To become a pack is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to shift from the molar to the molecular, the embrace a sort of errant multiplicity. Dog Town, which tells various stories surrounding the animals and people of a giant rescue in northern Arizona, is evidence of the cost and effort that many are willing to put in to care for sick and homeless animals.

The notorious PETA is, of course, diametrically opposed to such relations. To say nothing of their activism, their media tactics have become increasingly ridiculously. Not too long ago they began a media campaign called the holocaust on your plate. The campaign juxtaposed large pictures of holocaust victims within camp walls with shots of animals in farm cages. The creator of the media argued that the same mindset allowed both to happen. The animalization of the Jews is, of course nothing new. Several of the Nazi texts, particular those that focused on the so called original races from mythological times.

In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, there is an interesting anecdote about the relation of mice to Jews. He writes: “With mice we should also keep in mind the connection in German (a verb derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish or Yiddishized German, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by further extension secret dealings, hidden afairs, decit).” (p. 208)

Art Spiegelman’s well known Maus, tells one man’s experience of the holocaust by using anthropomorphic animals: the Jews are mice, the Polish pigs, the Nazis are cats, the Americans dogs and so forth. While there are several critical essays on Maus, they have become hard to find and many focus more of their attention on memory then the animalization of the holocaust. The effect, instead of trivializing history, brings a tenderness through sheer difference that is increasingly hard to find in the plethora of holocaust tales. The likely explanation here would be that of the uncanny valley - that non-humans with human characteristics create a strong emotional response. A somewhat similar attempt is made, in regards to the Iraq War, in Brian Vaughn’s Pride of Baghdad.

/3/ - Deep relations

While several texts have emerged regarding human animal relations, Midas Dekkers’ text Dearest Pet: On Bestiality remains one of the few that critical deals with zoophilia. Dekkers makes a fuss over how despite the intent of affection we have for our pets we can carefully mentally eliminate the possibility of cross species contact. This fear, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, has quite a bit to do with theology - the witch, the devil et cetera, are always bestial, unnatural. D and G, in A Thousand Plateaus, confront psychoanalysis as unduly erasing the category becoming-animal, that it reduces the animal to the drives, to the bare biology, even pre-biological (p. 258-259).

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Naughts (aka Zoo) follows two previously conjoined twins, Oliver and Oswald, whose wives die in a strange car accident. The two of them become obsessed with death, decay and the beginnings of life as well as strange coincidences surrounding the crash - the woman driving, who survived, was named Buick, and lost her baby after taken mercury in the past. She lost another pregnancy in the car crash - the car was a ford mercury. The accident was caused when Buick was distracted by a series of swans - the street she was on was swan lane.

The brothers soon produce time lapse movies of animals decaying, in an attempt to understand what happened to their wives as well as their own grief. Coupled with this is a fascination with amputation - Buick’s leg is amputated because of the crash and she later asks for the second to be done. This amputation, as well as Oswald’s and Oliver’s relationship, is mended through a strange appreciation of symmetry. The twins, both zoologists, relate their own state of being to the zoo in that, in previous times, conjoined twins would be deemed an oddity and locked up in cages, as was the aforementioned venus.

The films most interesting side character is, incidentally, Venus, a seamstress who sells her body and tells extravagant tales of bestiality on the side in hopes of one day being published. The large ominous blue sign of the Zoo, which simply says ZOO in giant blue letters, is seen backwards, as ooz or ooze, as that which all life returns to, as Venus goes of to either have sex with a zebra or die by it, it is not clear. By way of her unseen death, Venus provides a common connection of love and death as well as the knot of not being ever able to know how things end, the specifics of death (what the brothers are trying to understand) nor the beginning, the rising from the ooze.

If, following Badiou, we are capable of escaping the gravity of our bestial nature through a kind of errant immortality, then in what ways do we turn back to the animal?

/4/ - Battles or separation unraveled

The history channel’s recent special Life After Humans, wonders what would happen if every human on the planet was to up and leave. The show devotes most of its time to structural decay and the inevitable rampancy of animals after our sudden departure but also shows the severity of our current impact on them in myriad ways. For one, the special talked of how roads violently carve up the migration paths of many animals, most notably bears.

Warner Hertzog’s Grizzly Man is, at least partially, about a failed attempt to return to nature. The film follows Timothy Treadwell, an animal enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was found eaten alive by bears - his watch ticking on a disembodied hand. Treadwell, as well as various other animal hunters, many of which seem to care far less about conservation than he did, are written off, particularly when they die, as fools who tested the mettle of Mother Nature and hence none of us should be surprised.

Returning to Life After Humans, there is an ever present motif in disaster and apocalyptic/post apocalyptic films - that of the animals once enslaved, turning back to nature or perhaps, more accurately, reasserting their nature despite their bonds. The deer wondering through the abandoned school, the horse and carriage wondering without driver or passenger. Is this suggestive of a naive return to nature, to some harmony?

The very concept of nature itself, seen through the eyes of humans, is unnatural, such as when Lacan articulates the concept of antiphusis or anti-nature. As Lacanians such as Adrian Johnston and Lorenzo Chisea have discussed, human existence is shot through with the symbolic from the moment of our birth. Just as there is something always already ruined about humans (as animals at least) there is always the bit of the beast that cannot be erased from the animal - that glimmer of hunger or chance at escape which remains. The weighing question is the same that is at the end of the film Equus: who is it that really has the bit in the mouth?

Libidinal investment between modernism and postmodernism

/1/ - Conor Oberst on the Couch

Bright Eyes is one of those groups where it is hard to remember when it was not fashionable to like them or, put another way, when their newness was exciting and somehow ahead of the actual music itself. Bright Eyes, unlike some of the music I listened to near the beginning of my high school life, has aged fairly well and Conor Oberst, the band’s front man and lyricist, continues to produce flat out good music. The strongest point of Bright Eyes has always been the lyrics. While often disparagingly cast as ‘emo’ or simply depressing, Oberst’s lyrics are, more often then note, fairly complex constructions that deal with substantial issues.

A theme that seems to constantly rear its head in the lyrical content is that of the tension between time and movement, between a desire to be stationary and a need to be constantly in motion. This tension is often spoken of in terms of time. In the song “Motion Sickness” he ends with:

“So I want to get myself attached to something bolted down
So that these winds of circumstance won’t keep blowing me around
To when I land to when I leave there is enough time to sleep and sing
I keep running when all I want is to lay motionless”

But beyond these reasons - Oberst’s songs provide an interesting account of libidinal investment in music/art and how that relates to differing views of subjectivity in terms of modernism and postmodernism. This is due to the fact that much of Oberst’s work seems intensely personal yet at the same time distanced in that it is a fabricated personal closeness and this closeness is often expressed in a self referential way. In one song, a person pretending to be Oberst gives a false interview with a radio show host, claiming that his song “Padriac my prince” was written about his brother whom his mother drowned in a bathtub. After a bit the impersonator goes on to say that his mother repeatedly drowned babies she had named Padriac and then eventually denies he said any of his previous statements.

The entire fake interview pokes fun not only at the darkness of the album (as Oberst himself stated) but also the sheer ridiculousness of the autobiographical song which, in turn, relates to his larger concern about measurement and, in particular, time. The song foreshadows Obert’s future album, Fevers and Mirrors, which devotes itself to questions of measurement and systematic scrutiny.

/2/ - Rifts and riffs

The nebulous rift between modernity and postmodernity has been discussed to death (or maybe just hinted at to death and not adequately engaged for all I know) and there is a few standard themes that are generally agreed upon. Generally the passage from the first epoch to the other involves a movement away from grand (or meta) narratives, the Enlightenment project (and the general sense a progress) along with it.

The ‘postmodernly’ induced fracturous curse upon identity seems to, in a few ways, cause, or at least make easy, a kind of general mental paralysis in which leads to a declaration of ‘too complex!’ and then it becomes easier for nothing to be done. This is not of course the whole story but I think it is a larger part then many would like to acknowledge. Many of the tenets of postmodernism make it easy to just sit back in the ‘lounge chair of becoming’ and comment on the vast multiplicity.

A great example of this is the Bright Eyes song “We are nowhere and its now” in which the opening words are:

“If you hate the taste of wine, why do you drink it till you’re blind
And if you swear that there’s no truth and who cares how come you say it like you’re right?”

One can hear Žižek’s attack upon Derrideans who don’t see themselves as even possibly dogmatic here - saying there is no truth has a kind of central position like stating there is such a thing as truth. In the aforementioned song, Oberst goes on to describe feeling helpless/bewildered by everything moving around him ‘while the world was flying by’ and that there is ultimately something self delusional but perhaps necessary in finding a form of belief.

The song ends with a comment that seems to validate one of Žižek’s comments about the contemporary belief:

“She took a small silver wreathe and pinned it onto me
She said this one will bring you love
I don’t know if it’s true but I keep it for good luck”

Here is a perfect example of how we act as though something and/or someone else does our believing ‘for us’ - Žižek’s favorite example of this is Niels Bohr who when asked about the horseshoe on his door (a good luck charm) by a guest who couldn’t believe that a man of science would have such a thing replied: ‘I don’t believe in it but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.’ There is an odd kind of repetition here, that doing the action repeatedly, that one will develop habits which validate the belief behind the action. This is the key to understanding the ideological shift from Marx ‘They do it but they do not know they are doing it’ to Žižek ‘I know what I am doing but I do it anyway.’

On another level Oberst seems to decry the ridiculousness of purely formal gestures. In his song “Land locked blues” he attacks everyone’s inability to lose face even at the stoop of pure disaster. Take a look at one of the more interesting passages of lyrics:

And the world’s got me dizzy again
You think after 22 years I’d be used to the spin
And it only feels worse when I stay in one place
So I’m always pacing around or walking away
I keep drinking the ink from my pen
And I’m balancing history books up on my head
But it all boils down to one quotable phrase
If you love something, give it away

Obert’s lyrics constantly deplore as well as celebrate the idea that one cannot stop moving but, at the same time, is always chained by certain ‘passionate attachments’ (to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler). So what does our movement actually do, if anything?

/3/ - Repetition and Origins

The aforementioned tension, between knowing and doing, could be put into terms of the modern/postmodern split. In his essay “Philosophy as Creative Repetition” Alain Badiou suggests that philosophy is like a ‘voice in the dark’ and that it, using the image of Hegel’s ‘Owl of Minerva’ is always behind the times. Against the postmodern nihilism of ‘No Future!’ one must assert the possibility of newness. Badiou makes it clear that philosophy is not responsible for this newness, but can only measure it (here we return to the oddness of measuring). Following Althusser, he states that philosophy has no history, that it must always be an act, an attempt to corrupt young people (in the great tradition of Socrates). The philosophical act proper is to constantly scream that ‘a new dawn is here.’

One might borrow from one of Badiou’s great rivals, Gilles Deleuze, his concept of repetition as difference, the fact that difference inhabits repetition. As Deleuze argues, saying two things are alike erases the presupposed difference between any two things. The very ‘embeddedness’ of Deleuze’s difference (resulting from his concept of the plane of immanence and subsequent reversal of Kant) displays how experience purportedly explodes the categories that attempt to contain them. Though Deleuze’s argument is set against the Kantian grain, the late Lacan’s heavy topograhical discussions, and in particular his discussions regarding time’s relation to topography (here again I am borrowing from Adrian Johnston’s exciting Time Driven) which draw on Kant, seem to have a Deleuzian flavor. The following is Johnston quoting from Lacan’s 9th seminar:

“discontinuity is bound to what is the essence of the signifier, namely difference. If that on which we have made pivot, have ceaselessly brought back this function of the signifier, is to draw your attention to the fact that, even by repeating the same, the same by being repeated is inscribed as distinct” (SIX, 5/16/62) The question then arises - if Lacan is using topography here to insist (as Žižek argues in The Metastases of Enjoyment) that difference appears through some passage of time (the second look one takes at the Klein bottle or Borromean knot, the ‘pulsation of temporality’) then how far a cry is this from the plane of immanence? Here again is the tension between time and movement that Oberst’s lyrics seem so keen at grasping.

The Deleuzian difference seems to have it’s key in the very errancy of experience whereas for Lacan and Žižek, time serves only to bring us back to our original position - that is, in the case of the knot, it requires time to get back to beginning because everything is given to us at once, but it takes a while to acknowledge this. Deleuze’s immanence is a future-present whereas the synchronicity of Lacan’s past-future and present is a past-present, where we notice the big Other as the point du caption, we notice how the situation we are in has been structured all along to bring us to this moment.

/4/ - The vinyl epitaph or something more drastic

To bring this to a fairly ridiculous point then - how does one decide their top five albums?

The swan song of the album (as both physical construct and as a more vague form of collection) is, perhaps, news too old as the rise of mp3 encoding and digital music players have seemingly sealed its fate. A whole plethora of articles have long since surfaced regarding the shifting dynamics of the music industry - how the single has risen to prominence (along with the supporting music video), how downloading music is a response to the inflated prices of CDs, how a change in the delivery of music has long been over due and that downloading music allows for ease as well as lower cost. All across the internet one can find the warning bells - from Wired to The Wall Street Journal. There are, of course, those who are arguing against this decline, for business reasons and for more artistic reasons.

What interests me here, in regards to the album, is less these more pragmatic issues and more how the album (or the novel for that matter) is a form of organizing enjoyment/fantasy. Several theorists, and Jodi Dean in particular, have pointed out how Žižek argues how communities require a shared enjoyment, that without a sort of communal jouissance there can be no shared identity and that his sharing often comes from asserting that some other is or will attempt to take from this enjoyment (surely the enjoyment of albums most be the shared enjoyment of those particularly obnoxious forms of community - scenes). So what is the libidinal investment in the album, can the form ever die?

The album, it turns out, is perhaps a bit older than one might expect. A collection of songs was, according to the record, first referred to as a record in 1909. The physical construct of a record did not appear until the late 40s and weren’t really at all popular until the 50s and 60s. The question that remains - how can one, or is it even possible to, separate the particular way enjoyment, in this case musical enjoyment, is organized from the actual substance itself.

5 - The Final scene

Ultimately time and the innate sociality of human existence is what all of this comes down to - it’s the concept of shared enjoyment against/alongside our own complex sense of temporality. I think I can illustrate this with a clumsy scene.

You’re at a concert, the lights go down, the smoke rises up, the music begins. After some time you adjust to either the general disappointment or elation and take a look around you, you attempt to understand the crowd. A question is raised in regards to how everyone belongs, how does your fandom compare to everyone else’s? The biggest component of this question is a temporal one - are these other people true fans, have they listened to the band as long as I have?

So at one level we have a shared or communal enjoyment (seemingly) - all the fans in the room seem to be sharing something yet this enjoyment is (following the earlier discussion of Deleuze) internally divided. Alongside this there is the common knot of listening to a band because of their popularity in place of their artistic merits. At the same time of course there are those who get a shared joy from listening to music that is avant garde, or otherwise determinedly outside the mainstream. On the other hand music is so tied to particular events and times in our lives that any kind of even superficial shared enjoyment seems impossible. What is the answer here? This conflict is essentially parrallel to the problem of individuality in the face of formalism - the problem of science.

As Adrian Johnston discusses in Time Driven, when operation within a particular paradigm and faced with an individual case (here he is speaking specifically in regards to analysis). Regardless of the particular strengths of one’s knowledge and position, the ‘abyss of judgment’ cannot be dealt with before hand. The key then to the enjoyment of music is akin to the center of the problematic nature of systematicity in psychoanalysis - the crux of the paradigm or system is a series of lacunae, a series of gaps representing the impossible cause, the non-material and non-existent cause of desire.

While the shared enjoyment of music then is effectively hollow in at least two ways - one is that when we attempt to find a common denominator for our enjoyment we simply overlook the fact that enjoyment is inherently stupid and blind, that it is a pointless symbolic gesture (the way a dress falls over the back, the way one’s hair is tied up, one particular shape of the body) tied up with the Real (the sheer unbearable weight of it upon our being) and what it means for future (here the borromean knot is completed with the imaginary register, the way the whole fantasy supports our actions).

Here again is the Lacanian sense of time - the feeling enjoyment brings us back to the nothingness of our being, the ridiculous and vulgar feeling of pleasure which just is. To try and dissect the ‘x factor’, the ‘thing that gets our motor running, is to assume a definite purpose to the collision of nature and nurture where there is none.

Haunt of the Ecological Phantom or Gaia on the Couch

/1/ - The Fullness of the World

Just a cursory glance at several of the environmental or ecological theories or related philosophies, one immediately finds oneself on the Aristotelian side of the philosophical universe. This genesis goes through Spinoza, Bergson, and coming to fruition with Deleuze (and arguably Butler). One of the most basic Deleuzian concepts, is that of the One-all, the metaphysical consequent from the the univocity of being. (The equivocation of god and nature in this fashion was what got our friend Spinoza excommunicated.)

A kind of radical materialism is the end result, a “transcendental empiricism” and that all being is difference, everything is a kind of different molecular assemblage of the same material even in terms of concepts such as goodness. In his biting critique Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Badiou characterizes Deleuze’s philosophy as a form of monism, that it simply collapses the fundamental divisions of nature. Peter Hallward, who writes extensively on Badiou recently wrote an analysis of his great rival Deleuze entitled Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. In this text Hallward states that Deleuze’s ever differentiating sense of being places the virtual in a place completely alien to material reality, that it has no weight on the actual material world. For Deleuze the virtual remains a kind of positively charged cistern from where the event emerges as a kind of crystallization of the material of reality.One wonders at the necessity of this kind of philosophy. At a very basic level one has to wonder whether notions of idealism (which are often associated with the ‘other’ popular strain of philosophy starting with Plato and residing currently with Badiou) are maintained, particularly in regards to ‘being one with nature’ or in terms of Gaia Theory, that the earth itself is one giant organism. The underlying connections to the feminine and the relation to nature raise certain problems.

/2/ - Ecosublimity

The French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne attempted to bring together the issues of feminism and environmentalism in the radical era of the 1970s. Combining the two is fairly logical given how the naturalness of the female body is equated with images of virginal nature, of that which can be seeded, remade et cetera. At the same time eyebrows should be raised on the conflicts that arise from the extreme sexism found in many environmental movements. The figure of Edward Abbey is notable here. The so called ‘Thoreau of the American West’ was horrible sexist and automatically tied his vision of ecological activism to a kind of old time masculinity. His outbursts are not completely alien as environmental writing relies on a feminization of nature in writing - constructs of nature are described in terms of the female body. One could also make the connection between ‘Woman as Thing’ in courtly love and the early British use the sublime. The concept of the sublime was utilized by several British thinkers to describe certain objects of nature, in particular high peaks they had explored. The question to be asked is whether nature, or the environment is always already too much, too overwhelming.

In regards to the sublime, and the earlier mention of crystallization, the figure of Stendhal is of note. Stendhal is known for his psychological complex works of literature as well discussing love as a kind of crystallization, where the final step of one’s infatuation is delight caused by overrating the object of love. Stendhal syndrome, named after the author, was so called because he fainted from being overwhelmed in Florence, his heart pounded, his head became dizzied, at the sight of too much beauty.

Is there a kind of sublimity ‘at first sight’ or can it be recycled, is the bothersome similarities to more ethereal things, in nature, that brings about a kind of overwhelming? What is raised is the question of the narcissistic element of the sublime - where, according to Alenka Zupancic, speaking in Kantian terms, the passage from the horrible to the sublime is possible when the individual, confronted with the sight of nature rearing its head, places their bodies at the mercy of it but removes their mind, in a kind of ontological evacuation, thereby setting it above - ‘The boundless ocean above be is so great and I am so tiny but I can only appreciate such a difference by holding my consciousness above it.’

The problematics of reading crystallization with loss is found in suggested in a quote from Stendhal’s On Love: “In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.” Beyond the question of whether love can be recycled, one should ask if love is a kind of ghost that was never alive in the first place, or where does the ghost fall between crystallization and haunting?

/3/ - Ghost of the Dodo

While environmental issues can be narrowed to scientific terms, to get at the thinking through of loss one should take up deep ecology. Deep ecology sets out to question the ethical relationships between humans and their environment, and generally eschews the scientific objectivity which may overly divide humanity and nature. Ethical concerns in regards to the environment are most obvious when it comes to human caused extinctions, such as in the case of the Dodo. Here the aforementioned question of the ghost becomes important.

In her text Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imaginary, Avery Gordon argues that haunting is somewhere between “familiarity and strangeness” (p. 55) as well as that which “prevents rational detachment” (p. 98). In terms of environmental ethics, the Dodo cannot be recycled except as a kind of lesson about the carelessness of humanity. But is this re-use more of a haunting, the spectral form of the dumb bird itself, or more of a crystallization in the Stendhalian sense, a fold in the environment itself where the Dodo was never differentiated from the ecosphere, it was only one particular molecular configuration?

To return to Gaia theory, the tension that arises is again that of Deleuze and Badiou, of whether the exception, the evental happening, is somehow included within the vary material blanket of nature. A parallel to this the tension between the nihilist and the existential detectives in the film I ♥ Huckabees.

In the end the film attempts to synthesize the fullness of the world, the interconnectivity of all things and the fundamental negativity of life. The final consensus of the film is that the very interconnectivity is comprised of such negativity. The ghost then could be the very imperfection of this relation, where the fullness of the world is the very impossibility of harmony, where time is the effect of repetition that stalls or haunts us by blasting, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, into the present.

To say, following deep ecology, that humans are another part of the environment, is a thesis that is still undergoing considerable alteration. In terms of the environment then, humanity is symptomal to nature, it is always an exception while always being deeply constitutive, yet empty.

The final point to be made here is to attempt to bring together the symptomal nature of humanity within nature and the ghost, or haunting of the environment. Our very relation to the environment is self-haunting in that our very view of nature, at least in terms of plants and animals, is transitory. It is the pesky remainder of our own mortality.

/4/ - Specter of us

The cultural object which I believe brings this self or automatic haunting to bear, is the band Cloud Cult, and in particular their song ‘Your 8th Birthday.’

First, it is important to mention the environmental attitude of the band. Not only do they maintain and use a ecological friendly CD processing plant, but when they go on tour they ‘purchase carbon’ by investing money into wind power and planting trees to compensate for what they will use on tour. Cloud Cult also calls St. Paul, MN their home, a place where environmentalism runs rampant.

Their song ‘Your 8th Birthday,’ is about the son of two of the band members, Kaidin, who died when he was two in his sleep. One of the song’s most beautiful verses from the song is:

“You make traffic jams feel like parades
You bury the dead with the faith
That makes lightning bugs swarm
As if it was graduation “

Beyond the particular content of their lyrics, the imagery is suggestive of a multiplicity of hauntings. The title of the song itself speaks to what would have been Kaidin’s 8th birthday, had he lived, but beyond this, there at once the suggestion that nature accompanies us (’lightning bugs’) and is forgotten or under threat because of everyday humanity (’traffic jams’). The strongest connection here may be the faith that existence will continue despite the fact that we are always burying the dead.

Or, to put it another way, the specter contradictory displays our indebtedness to one time, yet, because of its repetition, suggests that time is out of joint, that it is beyond history, or in Derrida’s terms in a state of disjointure. ‘The present is lacking’ as Mallarme says, because there is no sense of the present time, particularly the ecological sense following a Aristotelian philosophical frame, but only that which can be reformed and remade, again. In the sense the ghost never disappears adequately but only flattens out. It is a transmogrification, that does not leave a gap to sense.

Leaky finitude

/1/ - (In)finity

How is that finitude exceeds infinitude? Exceed is a purposefully sloppy word to choose, it exceeds infinitude in its use-value to put it in inappropriately Marxist terms. Douglas Adams may have explained it best:

“Arthur had a clear idea of what infinity looked like. It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity-distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, p. 160).

A brief remark on Hegel is necessary here. In Being and Event Alain Badiou makes a very precise remark on Hegel and infinity: “Infinity becomes an internal reason of the finite itself, a simple attribute of experience in general, because it is a consequence of the regime of the one, of the between in which the thing resides, in the suture of its being-one and its being” (p. 163).

Infinity, as the ‘internal reason of the the finite itself’ seems to suggest the Hegelian concept of ‘bad infinity’ discussed in the The Science of Logic. This bad infinity is simply the finite repeated infinitely. Or to put it into Badiou’s terms “the infinite is merely the void in which the repetition of the finite operates” (p. 164). In this case the infinite becomes a void in which the finite ‘fills.’ Good infinity, which Hegel seems to dismiss as mathematical and beyond the material infinite.

Georg Cantor, one of the most pivotal figures in the development of mathematical set theory, discussed the difference between actual and potential infinity. Cantor’s mathematical intervention, showed that infinity was not some vague unreachable entity, but something that could be easily represented and defined mathematically.

/2/ - Finitude’s transcendence

FWJ Schelling, one of those darling German idealists, argued that eternity was some how less than temporality.
In The Ages of the World Schelling, in a wondrous move, argues that the idea of will allows freedom in the finite world as a means of escaping the deadlock of Spinoza’s monism. Schelling sees the concept of eternity as an inert mass that only gains any kind of value by being ‘temporalized.’ (This seems analogous to Hegel’s view of universality, that only through the singular does the universal mean anything).

Schelling

One might be tempted here to invoke Deleuze in response to show that his own concepts of time and space fit Schelling’s model. One of Deleuze’s arguments (which puts him close to Badiou) was that one cannot just assume difference between things since things located within the same genus have differences from one another. His conclusion was then to recognize how everything is grouped into categories and how everything exhibits internal difference. What is problematic though in reading Deleuze’s philosophy is how he argues towards a univocity of being, the One-all, in which change and difference operates through a kind of folding. It is on this point that Slavoj Žižek and Badiou point out how Deleuze falls back into monism, fatalism and does not give the subject its due justice.

Menger sponge!

To move the conversation away from materiality/space a bit, one could look at the Lacanian subject. As Mladen Dolar points out in his essay “Beyond Interpellation” the psychoanalytic subject emerges at the point where interpellation fails. That is, in terms of the aforementioned internal difference (or what Žižek refers to, via Hegel, as minimal difference) a subject is a subject in so far as it fails to match up with outside determinations. This is why, for Žižek, the ticklish object (the objet petit a) is the parallax object. Not just where one’s view of the object depends upon the subject’s subjective position but with the added theoretical twist that the object being observed has no objective status - the subject’s gaze is always already inscribed in the object itself (The Parallax View, p. 17). So objet petit a, which is a ‘little piece of the real, the rendering positive of a negative gap, is not a thing in itself different from other things but pure difference itself.

This is why it is again necessary to state the importance of the Lacanian real. The real is not thing itself that always escapes the bonds of a particular discourse: it is not a greased pig of language that has a positive existence we are always trying to find. The real is the internal lack, it is the reason why nothing is itself completely. And so the same is true for the subject - our status as subject, as capable of free acts, comes from our ability to fall through the cracks of determinism. The subject then escapes interpellation because interpellation misses some ‘true’ self but because what is misses is nothing, void.

/3/ - Taking oneself seriously

In “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell us About it” Alenka Zupancic points out how Hegel considered comedy the highest form of art and how this relates to finitude and infinitude. Zupancic discusses how the comedy is the universal at work (Lacan: The Silent Partners, p. 180). Whereas the epic narrates the universal (the abstract infinitely powerful gods) and tragedy stages the universal and the mortals fall short comedy, on the other hand, shows the universal through the very subject. This is evident though the importance of indestructibility in comedy. Everything goes wrong but still….. In true comedies, Zupancic argues, what is funny is not so much that a baron falls in the mud, or slips on the banana peel, but that after he falls that he acts as if it didn’t happen, he keeps going.

One might think of the intricacies in the idea of taking one’s self seriously. Is it funny that someone assumes a role completely, in that they take what they do seriously? But what is the minimal gap here between doing and being, isn’t the same as the good old Lacanian distinction of subject of the enunciated and the enunciation? Isn’t it hilarious when someone ‘pretends’ to be what they ‘really’ are because no one’s really anything? But isn’t the comedic life far better than….what? The postmodern game of ideological distance, of constantly avoiding the gap between what the Thing that speaks and the Thing that is spoken about.

The power of the ‘concrete universal’ is that it is the universal shinning through the particular and this is what speaks to the way in which finitude ‘exceeds’ the infinite. Comedy shows us that our finitude has a leak in it. According to Lacan, this leak has to do with the double effect of the signifier. The signifier introduces us into the signifying chain but at the same time we are stuck, passionately attached to a specific signifier (Ibid., p. 194).

Zupancic writes: “We are not infinite, we are not even finite” (Lacan: The Silent Partners, p. 195).